Washington Post Covers the Organic Body Care Controversy

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Green Standard
In a Growth Market, Regulations for 'Organics' Have Barely Taken Root

By Don Oldenburg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 15, 2003; Page C01

Inside the new Washington Convention Center, the Natural Products Expo East
trade show is underway with 1,700 companies exhibiting thousands of food,
pharmaceutical, personal-care and cleaning products. All of them are billed
as "natural"; many are labeled "organic."

Outside on a street corner, Diana Kaye leads a demonstration demanding truth
in the labeling of "organic" products. It has attracted a small crowd on
this September day.

Protesters wear sandwich-board shampoo bottles accusing three major
manufacturers of fudging their organic ingredients. One bottle alleges "100
Percent Organic Fraud," another "Lavender Flavored Tap Water for Misled
Sham-poo Consumers."

At the microphone, Kaye announces she's going to prove how good organic can
be. She glazes a seven-grain muffin with lemon body oil made from the
certified-organic ingredients used in all her Terressentials brand body-care
products, made at her farm in Middletown, Md.

She takes a big bite.

"Hmmm. Delicious!" she says.

Kaye doesn't recommend eating body-care products. But swallowing this one
was the most definitive act she could imagine to demonstrate her side in a
bitter industry donnybrook over the definition of a word whose marketplace
clout is rapidly growing.

As drugstores and supermarkets increasingly stock the kinds of shampoos,
lotions, moisturizer creams and body oils that only health food stores once
carried, she and a vocal group of self-described purists and consumer
advocates argue that, by any meaningful definition, many of those products
just aren't organic.

What's organic? Broadly speaking, everything derived from living organisms.
Got carbon? It's organic. But in the row over defining the meaning in foods
and other products, it's defined -- to one degree or another -- as made of
ingredients that are farmed without synthetic fertilizers, pesticides or
fungicides and manufactured into products without synthetic additives and
preservatives. The tempest in the "organic" shampoo bottle right now is
largely over degrees of organic.

Saved, and Sickened, by Chemicals

Diana Kaye and Jim Hahn, her life and business partner, aren't natural
rabble-rousers. Fifteen years ago, they were like other young workaholic
professionals in Washington. She was an interior designer; he was an
architect. They met and fell in love working together at a Dupont Circle
architectural firm.

Back then, life at their Adams Morgan apartment was quintessential '80s
yuppiedom. They bicycled to work, exercised at a health spa and washed down
One-a-Days with bottled water. Breakfast was granola; dinner chicken and
broccoli, food that's good for you. They looked like a Family Circle profile
for the healthier lifestyle.

"We thought we were healthy," says Kaye, 44.

Kaye got sick in 1988. A biopsy showed she had an unusually aggressive
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which put her in intensive care in less than a
month. A huge tumor crowded her lungs and heart.

"It was like chemo, chemo, chemo," Kaye says of the weekly regimen of
double-dose intravenous cocktails she endured at the National Institutes of
Health.

Nobody knows what exactly causes non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, but medical
researchers believe it can be environmentally induced. Kaye blames her
cancer on her father's use of DDT inside the house and out when she was
growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania. The insecticide was banned in the
United States in 1973 as a possible carcinogen, when Kaye was 14. After a
year of chemo, the cancer gave up, but severe side effects persisted. At a
loss, her doctors scribbled more prescriptions for two more years. Kaye
thinks chemotherapy wrecked her immune system and that the drugs she took
for side effects had their own side effects, requiring more drugs that
caused more side effects -- a cycle of stomach pain, nausea, fevers, rashes,
migraine headaches and painful joints.

"I was taking dozens of pills at a time. I had a row of pill bottles this
long," says Kaye, holding her hands at arm's length.

She says she also became highly sensitive to ordinary chemicals found in
homes -- detergents, cosmetics, weed killers. One whiff and her lungs closed
up, she says. She says she had reactions to the vinyl flooring, carpeting
and other building-material samples that went through her office and she had
to quit her job.

When her frustrated oncologist told her she had to learn to live with it,
she says, they started looking for alternatives.

"We knew it wasn't the cancer anymore," says Hahn, 46. "We weren't sure what
it was, but neither of us wanted to accept it."

Hahn dug deep into medical research. Not only was Kaye overloaded with
drugs, he concluded, but her severe sensitivities matched a newly defined
illness known as RADS, reactive airways dysfunction syndrome, which is
similar to asthma but induced by exposure to certain chemicals.

"I needed to change my life if I was to survive," says Kaye.

To start, they moved to Arlington, switched to an organic macrobiotic diet,
drank only distilled water, and began buying their groceries at health food
stores.

They went on a chemical-trashing spree, replacing all household cleaners,
insecticides and other everyday chemicals with homemade concoctions using
vinegar, baking soda, borax, orange oil and other natural ingredients. Hahn
started weaning Kaye off prescription drugs. He first had her stop using the
steroids, inhalers and pills she took to ease breathing, and replaced it
with an ancient Chinese herbal tea. When that worked, he says, he looked for
other alternatives and remedies.

Kaye felt better. But she still had occasional reactions to some body care
products labeled "organic" from health food stores. "We were baffled," she
says.

They became label sleuths, interpreters of ingredient double-speak. They
found synthetic additives hidden in the fluffy label language on "organic"
products -- petroleum-derived and man-made foaming substances and
preservatives, artificial colors and scents. There were compounds with names
such as alpha hydroxyl benzoate, methylparaben and disodium laureth
sulfosuccinate, some of them compounds found in lab tests to be toxic,
carcinogenic or hormone-disrupting in large amounts. Their copies of the
Hawley's Condensed Chemical Dictionary and the Hazardous Chemicals Desk
Reference fattened with yellow sticky notes.

Now on a mission, they read scientific studies from Stanford and other
universities indicating that these chemicals are easily absorbed through
skin, go directly into the bloodstream and accumulate in the body. Convinced
that such chemicals don't belong in products called "organic," they began
cooking up their own additive-free creams and lotions at their kitchen
table. When Kaye's cancer support group begged for more, one thing led to
another. Soon they were peddling organic goods through a mail-order
catalogue.

Feeling good now, they bought a small former sheep farm in 1996, a few
pastoral acres near Middletown, and geared up for bigger production. Kaye
contacted shops coast to coast. Her calling card: Made from organic
ingredients that get thumbs-up from independent government-approved
certifiers, that meet federal standards for organic foods -- the cocoa
butter is the same used in chocolate bars, the peppermint oil the same used
in candy.

"We thought we were going to be in health food stores nationwide," says Kaye.

The Sham in Shampoo

Seven years later, they're still not.

Kaye and Hahn say they were naive to think the marketplace would make shelf
space for their 100 percent certified-organic, handmade products. One
obstacle is price. Consumers pay a premium for organic personal care
products anyway, but Terressentials cost 30 percent more than that. As a
small artisan manufacturer, they can't buy their raw materials in bulk and
miss out on the truckload discounts big companies get. And using only
certified-organic ingredients is pricey.

But Kaye and Hahn hadn't foreseen they'd become industry pariahs for
upsetting the organic apple cart. As one California health food store
manager told Kaye, although Terressentials products are "as clean as I've
seen," she wouldn't order any because shoppers would question her other
organic products whose ingredients don't compare. "If my shampoo sits on a
store shelf, says 'organic' on it, and sells for $15 a bottle," says Kaye,
"and next to it is another shampoo that also says 'organic,' has a tiny
organic percentage and is full of synthetics and chemicals, but is $5 a
bottle, which one is the customer going to buy?" Kaye and Hahn also believed
that the organics business was different from others, that its philosophy
and products were both healthy for people and healthy for the planet.

Once the domain of hippies-turned-entrepreneurs whose mantra was "do good by
doing good," the organics industry saw an influx of lawsuits in the '90s.
Capital investors with dot-com bucks recognized a bargain investment --
long-overlooked organics had grown 25 percent annually over five years.
While the bottom-liners helped to mainstream organics into the
multibillion-dollar-a-year industry it is today, they also changed the
business that valued a deformed organic apple over a perfect "processed"
one.

Since no government or national industry standards govern what organic means
in the personal-care industry -- standards went into effect a year ago for
food -- "organic" has come to mean whatever a manufacturer wants. Some
products, like Terressentials, are made from all "certified-organic"
ingredients; others blend "organic" content with the same synthetics and
preservatives found in conventional products.

That industry split confuses customers. It irks Kaye and Hahn, and a growing
segment of self-described purists, who are calling for tough standards that
mirror Department of Agriculture standards for organic food.

The rest of the industry, favoring less rigid, less expensive standards,
counters with: But shampoo's not food. "We believe in the organic process
and we believe in having a standard," says Jeffrey Light, chairman of Jason
Natural Cosmetics, but "there's a difference between cosmetics and food."

"Either there's going to be some good standards or there's going to be
crappy standards, and we're going to let everyone know about it either way,"
says one leader of the strict-standards movement, David Bronner, president
of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, a California-based company founded by his
German-immigrant grandfather 50 years ago.

His long ponytail tied back, wearing black hemp pants, Bronner is the young
"Mr. Natural" of the industry. To make his point, this month he is
converting half of the Dr. Bronner products to meet USDA certified-organic
food standards.

Those standards require organic foods to be grown and processed without
conventional pesticides, synthetic fertilizers or sewage sludge, or
synthetic preservatives; and that animals be raised without the use of
antibiotics, bioengineering or growth hormones. Foods that are at least 95
percent organic by weight -- excluding salt and water -- can display the
official "USDA Organic" seal. Foods that are 70 to 94 percent organic in
weight or fluid volume can display "made with organic ingredients." At his
Expo East booth promoting certified-organic soaps and shower gels, Larry
Plesant says he fears that the word "organic" will see the same fate
"natural" did a decade ago, when big corporations slapped it on everything
until it meant nothing.

"What's it going to mean?" says Plesant, founder of Vermont Soap Works, in
Middlebury, Vt. " 'Organic' is where we draw the line because where do you
go from here? We're running out of words."

Consumer trust in organics is rising. A nationwide survey last October
commissioned by Whole Foods Market found that 55 percent of Americans have
tried organic products and 87 percent who regularly choose them said they
considered them of higher quality. Two-thirds of those shoppers said they
get their information about the products from the labels and the makers.

But Kaye says those labels can't be trusted: "When the consumer goes into
the store trusting the word 'organic,' they think all the products comply
with the regs for food. They don't, but they could."

Some manufacturers argue that applying rigorous food standards to nonfood
products would prove prohibitively costly. While most have stopped using
health-risky petrochemicals, still common are synthetic additives and
preservatives. Some products labeled "organic" contain a single-digit
percentage of organic content.

The kind of standards some industry players say they could live with is the
California Organic Products Act of 2003, which requires personal-care
products sold as organic to have at least 70 percent certified ingredients
by weight or fluid volume but doesn't outlaw some controversial synthetic
agents and preservatives.

Avalon Natural Products, one of the industry's big manufacturers, lobbied
for the legislation. Its CEO, Mark Egide, called it "a great achievement for
consumer protection." But Bronner says the California standards were
contrived by big companies to preempt tougher rules: "It's just the fox
guarding the henhouse."

But nothing gets under the skin of strict-standard advocates more than
hydrosols. Also known as floral water, hydrosols consist of tea water
infused with certified organic herbs or flowers. In the past, they were
considered to be a disposable byproduct of making essential oils or sold as
lightly scented skin spritzers. Major manufacturers such as Avalon, Jason
and Nature's Gate -- the three accused of misleading consumers at the
protest -- count the entire water content of the scented hydrosols as
organic content. Critics say that's deceptive.

Adam Eidinger, spokesman for the grassroots nonprofit Organic Consumers
Association, sponsor of the Expo East protest, says that without counting
the water, few of those watered-down products could come close to meeting
even California's 70 percent standard. Never mind that organic food
standards explicitly exclude water.

But hydrosol-counting manufacturers object to being portrayed as wrongdoers.
"I play by all the rules," says Light, the Jason chairman, at the Expo East
showcase. Jason products are labeled "Pure, Natural and Organic," though
they contain synthetics and preservatives and count hydrosols.

"That's not illegal," says Light. But he concedes there aren't many rules to
follow and won't be until the industry agrees on standards. "Bringing people
together at a table and working out our differences is the way to do this,"
he says. "Not taking this out to the streets."

Avalon's Egide says his Petaluma, Calif., company is prepared to accept
whatever standards emerge from the Organic Trade Association's standards
task force he co-founded. "If a year from now the OTA feels that they can't
accept hydrosols, that's fine," says Egide. "The hydrosol issue hasn't been
decided yet. We'll do what we need to do to conform when it is."

Barbara Robinson, deputy administrator of the USDA's Agricultural Marketing
Service, which implements the organic food standard, doesn't expect the dust
to settle for five or six years. "People feel pretty heated about these
things," she says. "I think it's premature for us to get into it. We'd just
be refereeing."

Back to the Garden

The uphill road curves so sharply past Kaye and Hahn's "Terressentials
Organic" farm and shop that it's easy to miss. With Catoctin Mountain as the
eastern backdrop, their "experimental garden" is overgrown with Russian
sage, Chinese rhubarb, lavender, marshmallow blooms. The barn is the
production room. The small laboratory smells of strong mint oil that's being
blended with beeswax to make lip protector.

Inside the retail shop, shelves are lined neatly with Terressentials' 80
products -- Luscious Lemon Body Creme, Organic Seductive Spice Anointing
Body Oil, Orange-White Chocolate Lip Protector. They sell mostly here and on
their Web site. They're carried by about 30 stores nationwide, from the
three stores of Rockville-based My Organic Market to the online Diamond
Organics in California.

But their challenge is of David-and-Goliath proportions.

Over mugs of organic Colombian coffee, Kaye and Hahn swap complaints.

"Remember that store that had that bright white lotion in a bottle?" says
Kaye.

Its front label listed blueberries, blackberries and strawberries. On the
ingredient list on the back were the additives and preservatives.

"Take all of these herbs and berries and put them in a blender. Now tell me,
why is that lotion white? Because it was stripped, bleached and processed!"

Hahn laughs. "No, no. Get 10 different juices and take an eyedropper drop
from each and put them into a 55-gallon drum of water. That would be clear.
Then you add the preservatives and other stuff."

Kaye adds: "And people'll say, 'Wow, this is so natural!' You can see right
through it!"

© 2003 The Washington Post Company